“It’ll be interesting to see what a Meadowfriend becomes after passing through the Great Gate. I have visions of being able to make every lawn in America grow so rapidly, with grass so tall, that people can’t find their houses.”
“And the buffalo herds return to roam all over North America, consuming lawn grass at a prodigious rate, and yet the grass leaps ever higher,” said Veevee.
“Grass growing from cracks in the sidewalks and asphalt tears it all into little chunks,” said Stone. “In this profuse jungle of life, no vehicle can move; even helicopters can’t land for longer than a minute or two before grass grows up so thick that the blades can’t turn again.”
“And three hundred million people die of starvation,” said Danny dryly.
“But the vast lawns make such a lovely cemetery,” said Veevee.
“Don’t worry, Danny. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t,” said Stone. “Lawns are the least interesting plants in the world. Everything interesting has been bred out of them. A true meadow has at least a hundred different species of grass, clumping here and there, with a thousand wildflowers and bulbs and tubers and mosses and ferns and-”
“Day lilies,” said Veevee. “I do love day lilies.”
“The poodles of the plant world,” said Stone scornfully.
“So pretty,” said Veevee. “Alone or in great fields of them. Don’t leave them out of our meadow, darling.”
Stone looked at Danny and rolled his eyes.
“I saw that, Peter,” said Veevee. “Eyerolling is rude.”
“Rude but necessary,” said Stone. “For your own good. Make your gate, Danny. The longer I stay here talking with Veevee, the more extravagant the trouble I’ll get myself into.”
“I’ll tell Hermia we’re ready,” said Danny.
Because his gatesense already told him exactly where the gate he had made for her in Rio was-her latest hiding place, the theory being that if she had to keep moving around, at least she could go to warm and interesting places-he was able to make a new gate straight there.
She wasn’t in her hotel room. That was a surprise. She knew that it was nearly time for the making of the Great Gate. She was supposed to be waiting.
Danny immediately made a return gate and stepped toward it just as the shotgun blast went off. He felt the pellets tear through his body and then … no pain at all, because he had passed through the gate back to the barn. He still gasped from the pain he no longer felt, and the others turned toward him.
“They found Hermia,” said Danny. “She wasn’t there, and they weren’t waiting around to talk about it.”
“Are you hurt?” asked Veevee, fingering his tattered shirt.
“I was, for a moment,” said Danny. “I may still have all the pellets in me. I can work on that later. The gate healed the wounds, and I have to find Hermia.”
“It can’t be her own people,” said Stone. “The Greeks may do many terrible things, but they wouldn’t kill the world’s only living gatemage.”
“But they’re the only ones who could track her,” said Danny.
“They might be tracking the trackers,” said Marion.
“Or they might have a sniffer of their own, whoever they are,” said Stone. “The Greeks track Hermia, but a sniffer could simply have found your gate and then waited for you.”
“Some fanatic group that really thinks we shouldn’t go back to Westil?” asked Veevee.
“Or some minions of the Gate Thief,” said Marion.
“I’m going to look,” said Danny. He made a tiny gate, really just a viewport, that showed him the room where someone had shot him.
Two men were standing there, one carrying a shotgun. “I know I hit him before he disappeared,” said one.
Danny made a gate and pulled it over them.
They arrived twenty feet above some spot out in the Atlantic Ocean, far from the nearest land. Danny’s new viewport was in place before they hit the water. The shotgun sank at once; the men cried out for help as they tried to swim.
They weren’t good at it. In fact, one of them was panicking and clearly had no idea how to swim.
Not Greeks, then. Hermia’s Family were proud of their heritage among the thalassocracy, and they were all taught to swim as babies.
Danny needed a way to hold them in place, where they’d be helpless, unable to escape, but in no danger.
Gravity would have to do the police work for him. Danny made a gate that scooped them out of the water, then dumped them twenty yards over it; he moved the mouth just under them to catch them. They fell a half inch into the gate’s mouth, which tossed them back up that half-inch and dropped them again. It gave them a continuous sensation of falling, but they could breathe and they could hear.
Through the viewport, Danny spoke to them.
“I could have put you a thousand feet down and the ocean would already have crushed you.”
The man who had held the shotgun was weeping. But the other seemed capable of listening.
“Where is the woman who lived in that hotel room?” asked Danny.
“Woman?” asked the man.
Danny moved the mouth of the gate so now they fell twenty yards before rising again. He let that go on for a minute and then returned them to a half-inch fall.
“Try again,” said Danny.
“She go to the beach,” said the man. “Then we go in her room. She not come back yet.”
Now that Danny had a chance to study the men, he could start making guesses. “Persians?” he asked. “Hindi?”
The assassin managed to look scornful in the midst of his ongoing terror.
“Tell me what Family you’re from,” said Danny.
“Never,” said the man.
So it was a Family-an Orphan would have declared his non-Family status proudly. And it was a Family that regarded hiding its identity as more important than life itself. Any of the known Families might have wanted to do this assassination stealthily, but the secrecy wouldn’t be important enough to die for it. After all, killing gatemages was something they were all sworn to do.
A Family, then, that everyone thought was extinct?
Danny ran through a mental list. Middle Eastern, from the look of them. But all the Families were Indo-European, and in the Middle East that list wasn’t very long. “Hittites?” he asked.
“No!” shouted the man.
Hittites they were, then. Interesting. Exciting, even. How had the Hittite Family remained hidden all this time? They were supposed to have been wiped out before Pompey came to Syria, though some Family historians speculated that they might have adopted the Armenians and helped them surreptitiously.
But historical interest would have to wait. “If Hermia is dead,” said Danny, “so are you.”
“Alive!” the man cried. “We not touch her.”
“No Great Gates!” shouted the other man, the weeping one. “Bel comes! Bel goes to Yllywee!”
So they were allies of the Gate Thief. Or shared his fear; Yllywee was an ancient name of Westil. Danny remembered the runic inscription in the Library of Congress. “We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many.” Manmages from another world-a world not Earth and not Westil. “Loki found the dark gate of Bel through which their god poured fear into the world.” Why would it matter whether Danny made a Great Gate if Bel already knew how to make gates of his own?
The Hittites knew something, and he had to find out what it was.
Danny moved the tail of the gate that suspended them to the barn. They plopped in a sodden mass amid the straw near a milking stall. At once Danny brought back the mouth of the gate, scooped them up, and hung them in the air ten feet above the barn floor.
“What’s going on, Danny?” demanded Marion. “How can you bring strangers to-”
“Hittites,” said Danny. “They shot me, and they know something about Bel.”
There had been enough discussion of the runic passage that everyone immediately understood the significance.